Day: May 14, 2018

Stage Russia, now in its second season of bringing filmed performances of contemporary Russian theatre to global audiences, has expanded to online streaming. Through the newly created Stage Russia app, which launched on April 12, even more audiences will now have access to the ever-growing trove of performances. We receive requests from a lot of people who live in areas where our programming is either not presented or was presented, but missed out on, and online streaming is a logical solution,” said Stage Russia creator Eddie Aronoff. “Russian theater is truly at the top of its game these days,...

Toronto, Ontario alt.theatre web editor Hayley Malouin reviews the world premiere of Kat Sandler’s BANG BANG at Factory Theatre. At turns delightfully hilarious and grippingly sinister, BANG BANG’s straddling of comedy and drama enables its complex exploration of police violence and artistic license. On my train ride home from Factory Theatre following the world premiere of Kat Sandler’s BANG BANG, I found myself audibly giggling in remembrance of the play’s dynamite comedy. The next moment, I burst into tears–a fact I failed to hide from the passenger sitting next to me. This (admittedly embarrassing) response is telling of BANG BANG’s nuanced and moving examination of the array of questions,...

Interview by Cristina Modreanu with the occasion of the first edition of Bonnie Marranca’s essays translated into Romanian. You coined the term “theatre of images” in one famous essay (1977), which is included in the book introducing your essays to Romanian readers. Can you say more about the context in which you observed that the visual dimension becomes prevalent on stage and about the three directors you chose as examples? The theatre of images idea was evolving in my thoughts while I was a graduate student at the City University (CUNY) Theatre doctoral program in New York City. I...

Rodney Ackland must be the most well-known forgotten man in postwar British theatre. His legend goes like this: Absolute Hell was originally titled The Pink Room, and first staged in 1952 at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it got a critical mauling. The Sunday Times’s Harold Hobson said that the audience “had the impression of being present, if not at the death of talent, at least at its very serious illness.” Hurt by such criticism, Ackland fell silent for almost four decades. Then, as he struggled against leukemia in the 1980s, he rewrote the play. Produced by the Orange Tree Theatre in 1988, it...

Mugamudigal, a city-based theatre group, gives lovers of the medium a chance to learn the ancient art of therukoothu. “An entire street would transform into a stage. The actors, positioned at two ends, would call out to each other. The fight scenes would be fearful. They would be shooting arrows at each other,” Priyanka Ulaganathan, a young architect, still recalls those nights she sat transfixed by the therukoothu performances in her village of Nangavalli in Salem. The stories were mostly from the Mahabharata. But soon, the culture of her village changed. Disco dancers replaced the koothu artists and the memory of watching the men...